Former UN Humanitarian Chief, Martin Griffiths, writing for the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), today calls for decisive action from the international community to prevent genocide in Gaza.
Martin Griffiths, who is an Honorary Associate at IDS, writes alongside Philip Proudfoot, Research Fellow at IDS, to call for:
- The restoration of humanitarian norms over aid distribution.
- Invoking of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, to compel the international community to intervene.
- The UN to step up its monitoring of international humanitarian law violations.
Griffiths and Proudfoot state that it has been abundantly clear that Israel has neither implemented nor even intended to comply with the International Court of Justice (ICJ’s) orders set out in 2024 and point to Israel’s near-total siege of Gaza:
‘The intent — often the hardest criteria to prove — could not be clearer: senior Israeli politicians and cabinet members openly call for Gaza’s eradication and ethnic cleansing again and again.’
‘International humanitarian law is more than a technical rulebook’
The authors outline three actions needed to respond to the genocide.
Firstly, they call for humanitarian norms around the provision of aid to be restored, in the face of a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which does not meet the needs of the people:
‘This is not neutral relief but weaponised aid by a belligerent. The international community must categorically reject it [the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation] using all available measures. To avert further genocidal acts, humanitarian organisations need immediate access to do their job.’
Second, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, established in reaction to mass atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere in the 1990s, should be invoked:
‘Responsibility to Protect rests on three pillars. First, every state must shield the population under its control from mass atrocity — an obligation Israel clearly fails in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which includes Gaza. Second, the international community must apply measures such as sanctions, asset freezes, or other targeted pressures to prevent such crimes. And third, if those measures fail, collective action is required.’
Third, greater monitoring is needed:
‘It might be time for the UN to establish a dedicated “justice cluster” tasked with monitoring IHL violations during any large-scale aid operation. Field NGOs and UN Agencies ought to embed legal advisors so that every obstruction — every diverted convoy, every attack on aid workers — is logged with even more forensic detail.’
For further information read the full article: It is genocide: Humanitarian law must be enforced in Gaza
